My Sister's Hands

My sister's hands look like mine— same short fingers, same bitten nails, same tendency to talk with them when the mouth runs out of words. We shared a room for seventeen years. She knows the sound of my crying better than my husband does. I know the sound of her breathing asleep— a sound I didn't know I memorized until I slept alone for the first time and the silence was deafening. We fought the way sisters fight— borrowed clothes, stolen secrets, words designed to wound the exact spot only a sister knows exists. And we made up the way sisters make up— without apology, without discussion, just one of us walking into the other's room and sitting down like nothing happened. Because nothing did. Nothing that can undo seventeen years of shared walls and shared blood and the shared understanding that no one on this earth will ever know you the way the person who grew up beside you knows you— completely, annoyingly, forever.